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20.10.2018 Feature Article

The Myth of British-Bequeathed Northern-Ghana Development Fund – Part 1

The Myth of British-Bequeathed Northern-Ghana Development Fund – Part 1
20.10.2018 LISTEN

A couple of days ago, two separate videotaped “bitching sessions” were “whatsapped” me by one of my relatives who solicited my gut feelings or reaction about the same. Ordinarily, I would have listened briefly to both of them and then promptly deleted them as, almost invariably, videotaped bitching sessions often have little or absolutely no bearing on our collective well-being as a people or national development as bona fide Ghanaian citizens. Which, of course, is not to imply that either of these two particular videotapes were of any merit or socio-politically and/or culturally redeeming features, for they clearly and obviously did not. However, the first of the two that I watched, featuring a very angry Ghanaian woman who claimed to be of northern descent and resident in the Washington, DC, region of the United States, exhibited relatively more tact and common sense even if it was inescapably jaundiced and grossly misguided in parts.

In the main, the plaintiff claimed to be responding to some uncomplimentary remarks that the Asante Regional Minister was alleged to have made about Ghanaians of northern extraction or descent, which sought to impugn the common sense, dignity and cultural and moral enlightenment of northerners. As of this writing, my very busy schedule had not permitted me the opportunity to directly acquaint myself, first-hand, with the precise contents of what the Asante Regional Minister is alleged to have said in a radio interview program about our northern-descended brothers and sisters. Nevertheless, what amused me in no small measure was the rather scandalous assertion, and one that continues to hold sway among a critical mass of fairly well-educated northerners, is the myth that the provision of fee-free elementary and secondary education in the post-Nkrumah era exclusively to Ghanaians of northern descent had, somehow, been made possible by some humongous financial endowment that the departing British colonialists had made available to the country’s first postcolonial leader, then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah.

It is a myth because absolutely none of the traders or espousers of such mythology have been able to produce any hard forensically sustainable evidence to back up their claim. We must also quickly point out that even the bulk of the revenue reserves accruing from the sale of the country’s cocoa exports, even as I write, continues to be stashed up in the vaults of British banks in London and elsewhere in the UK and is obviously being used primarily for the development of Ghana’s erstwhile imperialist suzerain or overlord. On the latter count must also be underscored the fact that by and large, European colonial rule in Africa and in the so-called Third-World countries at large was not about either generous European investment or development of these former colonies. Rather, it was decidedly and indisputably about the wanton exploitation of the colonized for the massive enrichment of the European or the so-called Metropolitan, Crown or Mother countries.

If the afore-referenced unnamed plaintiff has any doubts, let her read Walter Rodney’s authoritative polemic and classic tome on this very subject, to wit, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.” At any rate, it is equally preposterous for anybody to suggest that the labor component that critically contributed to the development of the cocoa industry, and which Dr. JB Danquah described as the “modern backbone of Ghana’s economy,” or the country’s economic mainstay in the pre-petroleum or “Black-Gold” era, was either the especial or exclusive preserve of Ghanaians of northern descent. The record books simply do not support such self-preening poppycock. At any rate, it would be more accurate to observe that Ewes played the most-major role in the non-Akan external supply of labor for the development of the cocoa industry. Yes, it is true that a remarkable percentage of northern-descended Ghanaians contributed their paid or legitimately negotiated manpower or labor to the development of the cocoa industry; but it cannot be gainsaid that the lion’s share of the labor pool that went into the massive development of the cocoa industry was the veritable contribution of Ghanaians of Akan descent.

We also have on record the fact that migrant laborers from as far away as Central Africa came to work on cocoa farms and plantations in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. The continuation of the fee-free or tuition-free education for northern-descended Ghanaians in the post-Nkrumah era was thus a savvy policy initiative preserved and healthily promoted by leaders of successive Ghanaian governments, that was wisely and progressively aimed at facilitating the evening up of the intellectual and cultural development gap between Ghanaians from the northern-half of the country with the rest of the same, especially the “Kabonga South,” and not primarily because of any agreement struck between then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and the departing British colonialists, with the purported assent of some unidentified northern Ghanaian leaders. The stark fact of the matter is that Ghanaians of southern descent owe their northern-descended brothers and sisters absolutely no debt of gratitude either in kind or cash. It is as simple as that.

It ought to be commonsensically obvious to all that if the British colonial rulers really cared about the modernization and development of the old or former Northern Territories, they would have embarked on such a progressive and politically civilized project for the entire period that they wielded their political strangle on the geopolitical tract of land that became known as the Gold Coast and later Ghana. It is simply scandalously naïve to attribute to the British colonialists political intentions that were ages far from what their real colonial agenda and ideology was and had been in practice. That it would take Gen. IK Acheampong, in 1974, to build the first major and modern hospital in the Northern Region, in Tamale, to be exact, ought to speak soberly and meaningfully to these grossly misguided angry northerners. The Myth of the British-Bequeathed Northern-Ghana Development Fund may sound politically self-redeeming, but it is an untenable historical reality that must be wisely, intelligently and commonsensically confronted as such.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
October 19, 2018
E-mail: [email protected]

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